In a first for Deane Apparel, we’re celebrating the release of our 2025 Sustainability Progress Report.

After finishing the first year of our three-year strategy we thought there was no better time to rate our performance, celebrate what we’ve achieved and reflect on what we’ve learnt. 

Performance Snapshot

We’d give ourselves a ‘well done kid’, B+ for our first-year performance. A very solid effort but always room for improvement.

Year one can often be hard especially as we worked to set up the governance structures, framework and reporting that’ll be critical for future success.

What did we achieve?

We met a lot of our individual initiatives (68% of them to precise!) and please, read the report for details but easily the most satisfying was genuinely seeing Sustainability embedding itself into the fabric of Deane Apparel. Our internal knowledge across departments has grown exponentially as we’ve focussed on bringing the strategy to life. 

This has resulted in a noticeable cultural shift and a change in attitudes. If we can start to change attitudes, we can change people habits, not just at work but in their homes and communities as well. 

What did we learn?

SO! MUCH! A few key things:

• Eat an elephant one bite at a time – we started the year with a pretty overwhelming list. It took some discipline to chunk it into bite sized pieces but very rewarding once we started ticking things off the list.


• Experts are gold – we’re lucky enough to have the guidance of our amazing part-time Sustainability Consultant, Vanessa Thompson from Go Well. Having a subject matter expert coupled with an external person holding our team to account, was a game changer.


• Testing is critical & time consuming - when you sell a uniform or piece of clothing for work, people expect it to last a looooong time (arguably longer than something you’d buy in retail). Durability has to remain at the heart of our design principles (which is a good thing, since it’s also a fundamental of circular design) but making sure that the quality of our garments isn’t impacted by moving to sustainable fibres is important work, so patience is key.